by Lee Martin
Just east of Georgetown, he crossed the river bridge like Clare said he should. Then he turned down the first gravel road, and soon he was in Honeywell. He drove past the run-down houses, following the road as it turned from gravel to shale and then dirt. He pulled off to the side and got out of the car. The heat was coming on. Not a breath of air, the locusts chirring, and the sun full up, and somewhere in the distance a woodpecker drilling at a tree, the rat-a-tat carrying a good long ways.
Mr. Dees walked down the road, not knowing where he was headed, not caring that his shoes and the bottoms of his pants legs were getting muddy. The road swung out wide of the woods and opened onto a piece of bottomland where a farmer had planted corn.
It was there, in the soft ground, that Mr. Dees saw the footprints and a ragged patch of black cloth he feared had come from Katie’s T-shirt.
INSIDE THE HOUSE, Patsy Mackey heard the garage door come down. She was upstairs in the bathroom, drying herself after stepping out of the shower, the first time she had bathed that week. She’d worn the same pair of golf shorts and sleeveless blouse she’d had on that Wednesday evening when she’d stepped onto the patio and called for Gilley.
Now, to her surprise, she felt no need to hurry. She waited a few seconds, hoping to hear the sound of the door opening to the kitchen and then Gil calling for her as he bounded up the stairs with news—good news—about Katie. Water dripped from the showerhead. Patsy slipped into a robe and moved out into her bedroom. The clock on the night table ticked. When enough time had passed and there was still no sign that Gil had come in from the garage, she picked up a comb from her dresser and ran it through her hair. She watched herself in the mirror, and it was as if she were watching some other woman; it was the way she had felt that night in Indianapolis when she had let Gil lay his hand against the small of her back and nudge her across the doctor’s threshold.
Now she took her time getting dressed. She laid out fresh underclothes and went to the closet, thinking she should put on something beside golf shorts and those bright summer blouses she favored, something more somber, something more in keeping with—and here the truth hit her, the thing she had been fearing all night while she waited for Gil to come home, and her legs went weak and tears came to her eyes—something more appropriate for a woman who had lost her child, a mother in mourning.
She was sitting on the bed, threading a needle, when Junior came into the room. She heard his footsteps, but she wouldn’t look at him, taking comfort instead in the concentration it required to sight the thread through the needle’s eye. She meant to reinforce the hem in a pair of dark-gray slacks she hadn’t worn since winter. The hem had come loose one night at the country club and she’d thought, Well, there’s something to see to, but she’d put the slacks away in her closet and then spring had come and she’d never gotten around to her mending.
Now she tied off the thread, her fingers nimble and quick. Her robe had fallen away from her leg, and the needle, dangling at the end of the thread, tickled her knee.
“I could sleep,” Junior said. “I swear, Patsy. I wish I could sleep for a million years.”
She’d been praying that he wouldn’t say a word. She wanted there to only be the needle and the thread and the stitches she’d make through the cloth. If he didn’t speak—if she only sat there and sewed that hem—she’d at least have that small moment of time, that grace, before she knew for certain how their lives would move on from that point.
But he said what he did about wanting to sleep, and there was such misery in his voice that she couldn’t help but look up at him, and that’s when she saw that he was in his boxer shorts and T-shirt.
“Your clothes,” she said. “What’s happened to your clothes?”
He slipped off his wristwatch and laid it on the dresser. “Clothes,” he said with a smirk and a shake of his head.
“Junior,” she said. “What’s happened?” she finally asked. “That man. Did you . . . ?”
“We got him. We got him and he wouldn’t tell us anything.” He told her how Mr. Dees had refused him. He said the name of the man who had done the job instead. It was a man Patsy knew, the man she’d seen earlier that summer on their patio arguing with Junior. That man who worked at the glassworks. The one who came to ask for his pay. Patsy couldn’t even remember what he looked like. He was that kind of man, someone who could bail a man out of jail in the middle of the night and disappear, leaving the ones who had seen him scratching their heads as they tried to describe what he looked like. He wasn’t a bad man, just someone like them, Patsy thought. Someone who’d hit some back luck. He had a little girl of his own, a little girl who’d been sick down at St. Jude’s in Memphis. He needed money. So he’d been the one. Junior went on to tell her that Gilley had come to the glassworks, that he’d been there when Junior had that Colt under Raymond Wright’s chin. “Then Henry Dees showed up. Good Christ, Patsy. It was a mess.” He told her about Raymond R. knocking the Colt from his hand and how Gilley tried to grab it, but Raymond R. had it, too, and the two of them wrestled for it. “Then I had it, Patsy, and that son of a bitch was choking Gilley, so I had to do something.”
“Did you kill him, Gil? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“He didn’t deserve to take another breath. That’s the way I look at it, Patsy. Not after what he’s done. It’s been four days, Patsy. Four days. Good Christ.”
She felt that she might faint, and not wanting to slip away, she took the needle and she stuck it into her leg and watched a drop of blood bead up. “What do we do now?”
“What we’ve been doing, I guess. We wait.”
“Only we know now, don’t we? That’s what you’re saying. We know Katie isn’t coming back.”
For the first time, Junior felt how hard everything was going to be from then on. He could barely speak. “Yes,” he said in a choked whisper. “We know.”
“What about Gilley? Is Gilley all right?”
“Gilley’s fine.”
But he wasn’t. He was in his room, naked now, wrapped up in his bedclothes, his knees drawn to his chest, shivering, colder than he had ever been.
MR. DEES picked up the patch of black cloth and followed the footprints through the cornfield. Whoever had left them had tromped on the young corn plants. They lay broken over and pressed down into the mud. Mr. Dees stepped carefully over the rows, finally coming out on the other side of the field where the woods took up again.
He followed the prints as best he could, and he found an old road crowded in by brush. It was cooler in the woods—so cool and still in the shade of beech and oak and hickory and sweet gum and ash—and it was nice to be out of the sun. He could hear his footsteps on the roadbed of shale. It was that quiet, only an occasional crow call or a squirrel scrabbling around in the trees.
“So quiet, you’d hardly think it was a place for such a thing,” he’d later say to Junior Mackey, and then immediately feel like a fool because by then he would have told the worst of it—how he followed the road deeper into the woods to the old junk pile where people, years ago, had come to dump their used-up refrigerators, couches, kitchen stoves, freezers, tires.
At first, the splintered handle meant nothing to him. He nudged it with the toe of his shoe. It was just another piece of junk someone had got rid of, a wooden handle from a shovel or a hoe. Then he saw a rusted sheet of tin roofing, lying over a mess of dead leaves. The ground was bare outside the cover of the tin, and he could see where the gray dust of the powdery topsoil gave way to clods of darker dirt, the rich loam from years and years of rot. He knew then that the handle belonged to a shovel and that someone, not long ago, had used it to dig in the spot the tin now covered.
He lifted the tin and moved it away. He scraped back the leaves and pressed his hand to the ground, feeling for soft spots where the dirt hadn’t filled in. Someone had to do this, he decided. Eventually it had to be someone, and it was better that it was him, who had loved Katie—who was used to being alone with sad
ness—than someone who would run now from the woods, run to a telephone to call the police, to tell them to hurry, quick.
Soon enough, there would be police cars and sheriff’s cars and state patrol cars, and an ambulance. There would be men tromping in and out of those woods, carting away the broken shovel handle, an old galvanized bucket with a brown hair across its bail, a hickory stump stained with blood. But for now there was only him and the quiet and the cool shade and the dirt and his fingers pressing down into the soft spots, digging with his hands, taking his time.
It was Katie’s bare leg that he reached first. The skin was the color of ash. Raymond R. had cut her throat; the tips of her fingers were gone.
Her eyes were open—those green eyes—and that was what broke him. He knelt over Katie’s body, sobbing, with no one in the world to hear him.
He pulled his shirttails loose from his trousers, and he used them to clean the dirt from Katie’s eyes. Then he tried to think what he should do next. If he went to the police, the questions would begin: How did he know about this place? Why hadn’t he come to the police instead of going down to Honeywell by himself? Where was he last night? What did he know about where Raymond R. had gone? Had he been with him the night Katie disappeared? He didn’t want anything to do with those questions. He didn’t even think he could call Tom Evers on the telephone and keep his identity a secret the way he had that night when he called to say that Tom could find the truck he was looking for—in Gooseneck. He wouldn’t be able to say the words that he had found Katie and that she was dead.
But he had to do something. The sight of Katie’s hurt body was too much for him—that brown hair, those green eyes, the only things that looked to him like Katie at all. He took off his shirt and covered her. He tried to say a prayer. Then he sat there a good while, knowing he couldn’t stay there forever, knowing he couldn’t just walk away and not say a word about what he had found.
Finally, he decided he would go back to Tower Hill and tell Junior Mackey. They already had secrets between them, and Mr. Dees would ask him to let this be one more.
It came to Mr. Dees then that he couldn’t leave his shirt over Katie for someone to find, that he couldn’t leave her body out in the open where coyotes might worry it. He knew he would have to slip her back into the makeshift grave, and that was what pained him most of all, having to fill in the dirt and leave her. He put his shirt back on, even though it carried the odor of decay now, and he went back through the cornfield to his car.
When he finally spoke to Junior Mackey, it was on the telephone. He told him how he had taken off his shirt and covered Katie, how he had said as much of the Twenty-third Psalm as he could remember, the parts about green pastures and still waters, about fearing no evil, about goodness and mercy and dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.
“How did you know where to find her?” Junior asked him. His voice was all hollowed out as if he had already accepted that soon this moment would come.
“It was Clare Wright. Raymond’s wife. She told me where to look.” For a good while, there was only the sound of Junior taking ragged breaths as if he was trying hard not to weep. Finally, Mr. Dees said, “What will you do now?”
“I’ll do what any father would do. I’ll go get my girl. I won’t leave her the way you did.”
It hurt Mr. Dees to hear that—made him want to hang up the phone and be alone with that hurt—but he had to keep talking. He had to make something clear to Junior. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Trust me. Please. Call Tom Evers. Tell him where to go. Please, Junior, for your sake and for Patsy’s, let Tom see to what has to be done.”
A short time later, when Mr. Dees went into his bedroom to change out of his clothes, he reached his fingers into his shirt pocket to fish out his fountain pen and discovered that the pocket was empty, the pen nowhere to be found.
Mr. Dees
I DIDN’T THINK anything then about where that pen had gone, only that I’d lost it somewhere. You have to understand that I was still shaking with the fact that I had found Katie’s body, that I’d left her there in that grave. I could barely think what to do next. I stuffed my shirt into a paper grocery sack, carried it outside to my burn barrel, and set it on fire.
You’re probably thinking, That’s what Raymond R. did that Wednesday night, the fifth—burned his clothes. A guilty man covering his tracks. You’re probably thinking I’m like him.
But wait. We’re almost at the end. Stay with me just a while longer. What do you have to lose now? Please, don’t go.
July 9
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when the police car turned into Mr. Dees’s drive. He watched from the kitchen window as Tom Evers got out of the car. Another policeman was with him, and Mr. Dees recognized him as the one who had first questioned him on the night of the fifth, the fat-fingered policeman who had written with a hacked-up stub of a pencil.
“Mister Dees.” Tom Evers was knocking on the back door, and Mr. Dees thought for a moment that if he just kept quiet Tom would go away and not bother him. After a night and day when people required so much of him, he just wanted to do nothing and have everything be all right. “Henry Dees,” Tom Evers said, and he said it the way Mr. Dees would have said it had he been scolding a student who had misbehaved. He knew then he had no choice but to open the door and see what Tom Evers wanted.
It was the Comet, Tom said when he and the fat-fingered policeman came into the house. He wanted to have a look at it. Yes, right now.
Mr. Dees let the two men into his garage. The fat-fingered policeman looked down the sides of the Comet. “It’s been in mud, all right,” he said, “and not too long ago, I’d say.”
Mr. Dees stood in the sunlight, watching as Tom crouched down behind the car and ran his finger over one of the tires. He stepped out into the light and studied the muck on his finger. He raised it to his nose and sniffed at it. He showed it to the fat-fingered policeman, who smelled it, too. “Shale,” Tom Evers said.
That’s when the fat-fingered policeman said, “Should we show it to him now?”
“Yes,” said Tom, “I expect we should.”
They led Mr. Dees to the patrol car. Tom Evers reached in through the open window and plucked a small plastic bag from the dashboard. Inside the bag was a fountain pen.
“We know it’s yours,” Tom said to Mr. Dees. “Burt here.” He nodded his head at the fat-fingered policeman. “He remembers that you offered it to him the night of the fifth when he came to question you about Katie Mackey.”
“A Parker 51,” Burt said.
“We found Katie Mackey’s body down near Honeywell, and we found this pen with her in the grave.” Mr. Dees was standing with his back up against the patrol car. Tom Evers had his hand on the car and he was leaning in close to him. “Mister Dees, there’s footprints in a muddy field down there. A jumbled-up mess of prints. But we’ve got reason to believe two men made them. Two men going into those woods where we found Katie and two men coming out. On top of that, I’ve got a suspect someone bailed out of jail and now we don’t know where Raymond R. Wright is. You want me to keep going? All right, sir. Junior Mackey came to me shortly before noon, and he said a man had called him and told him where he might find Katie’s body. Mister Dees, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that the man who told Junior that wasn’t you. Things are starting to add up, and if I was you, I wouldn’t like the answers we’re starting to imagine, answers about you and Raymond Wright and what you had to do with the kidnapping and murder of Katie Mackey. I think you ought to talk, and this time I think you ought to make sure that you tell us the truth.”
Mr. Dees
SO I DID, and now I’ll tell it to you. I told Tom Evers that yes, I was the one who called to tell Junior Mackey that he’d find Katie buried near a junk heap—the letter J, Margot Cherry had said—in a wooded area off a shale road near Honeywell. I’d said there were footprints in a cornfield and they led back into the woods. How did I know it? I told Tom Evers I’d been the firs
t one to find Katie, but I’d been afraid to come to him myself and say so.
When he asked me why, I told him I was a shy man. I lived a quiet life. I didn’t think it was my story to tell. It belonged to Junior Mackey. He was her father. I gave the news to him.
I said that Clare Wright had been the one to tell me where to look for Katie. “It came to her in a dream,” I said, and then I told Tom how one evening that summer she and Raymond R. had driven down to Honeywell and he had used his binoculars, claiming he was trying to see the smokestacks they were building at that power plant across the river in Brick Chapel. “She was too embarrassed to tell you she might have a clue after that mess with the snapshot of the Mackeys’ house, the one with Katie supposedly at the window. So she told it to me, and I went down there. People like Clare and me, we’ve never been anything. Now our lives are too much for us. We don’t know how to act.”
Then I explained that yes, I’d driven to Honeywell that morning, and I’d seen those footprints in the cornfield and a bit of Katie’s black T-shirt. I’d left my own prints in that field. “I won’t deny that, Tom.” I told him how I’d found the grave underneath a piece of rusted tin—that was the detail that made him start to believe that I might be telling the truth.
“Katie’s body,” he said. “What do you remember?”
I knew he was looking for the facts that someone would only know if he had been there.
“Her throat was cut,” I said, and I could barely get the words out of my mouth. “It was horrible, Tom. You’ve seen. Her throat was cut, and the tips of her fingers were gone.”